A Personal Story : World Water Day 2019

There are times in my travels when I look at my surroundings, think of my home in Victoria, Canada, and whisper “I’m a very long way from home”. Everything is foreign to me — the smells, sounds, culture, geography, affluence. Sometimes, I feel very small and very far away.

So it was in 2012. I was with a team of Canadian college students at a Burmese migrant school an hour from Mae Sot. The school was no more than a collection of leaky bamboo huts, in a patch of red dirt, surrounded by jungle. Most of the kids came from a village about 10 kilometres away. They stayed at the school and only went home during holidays. Some stayed year round because they had no family and no home.

Over the next four days, our team and Imagine Thailand installed a water purification system and ran a fun “camp” for the kids. The immediate gift was the camp ... the circus had come to town! But the lasting gift was the water system. We are gone, but it remains.

How much of a gift it was hit me hard when, two years later, I found myself back at that little school. The Headmaster recognized me. I asked him about the water. He said, “at the village, people die. But here, the children live. Imagine Thailand is very kind”.

It was that simple, some had died, others had lived, and the difference was one water system at a lonely school. His gracious comment meant the world to us.

At Imagine Thailand, we want to do more, but we are constrained by budget and manpower. We know there are thousands of other schools and villages where “some will live and others will die”, simply for the lack of clean water.

Today is World Water Day. For this one day, there is at least a bit of a focus on this pressing need. But the need doesn’t go away on March 23rd. It remains. Raw and tragic, it remains.

Would you consider helping, that others may live? If so, please contact us here at Imagine Thailand if you would like to know more. We would love to hear from you.